


Our Mutual Cares

by dreamlittleyo



Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Angst, Canon Era, Feelings, First Kiss, M/M, Peril, Power Imbalance, Rank Disparity, Schuylkill River Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-24
Updated: 2018-12-24
Packaged: 2019-09-26 10:19:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,304
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17139962
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dreamlittleyo/pseuds/dreamlittleyo
Summary: In which Hamilton is presumed dead, and returns to camp just in time to interrupt his own wake.





	Our Mutual Cares

No one who knew the general would ever accuse him of caring too little.

The aura of control was pure facade. Rigidly crafted, perfectly maintained, but still an illusion. A protective bulwark masking an ocean of more potent passions beneath. The smooth, unflappable blank of the man's face was no proof of apathy—not to those who had seen Washington's rare but terrifying flares of temper.

Hamilton witnessed those flares more often than most. He'd carved himself an inextricable space at Washington's right hand. He had rendered himself indispensable. Which meant he was there during the worst times—the most hopeless nights—the moments the war seemed all but lost.

Perhaps seeing his general's iron control slip should have quelled Hamilton’s hero-worship. To witness unwelcome proof that Washington was just a man after all, and not the legend his reputation had become. Certainly it was jarring to be caught in the crossfire when Washington's temper broke through and lashed out at any convenient target. Woe to the soldier who put a foot out of line in such a moment; no shortcoming was too small to be omitted from a thorough dressing down.

Hamilton had seen such explosions half a dozen times since joining Washington's staff. He had only ever been the target once, and it was an experience he hoped never to repeat.

But even this did not abate his admiration for the general. It took a week for wronged and righteous anger to subside; a week more for his pride to stop stinging. But Hamilton—more stubborn than most—had continued his work without interruption. And when Washington delegated a difficult and vital mission to him, it felt very nearly like an apology.

Yes, he still refused to offer Hamilton the command so desperately overdue. But Hamilton's frustrated ambition would not prevent him from proving himself in every role his general _did_ allow.

The mission was a success, except for the significant detail that Hamilton did not escape with his soldiers. There was a skirmish—inevitable, considering the mission was to confiscate or burn the contents of a river mill before advancing British forces could take vital supplies—and then an unlucky musket ball shot his horse from beneath him halfway across the river.

As his men disappeared into the forest, Hamilton swallowed his oaths, keeping quiet and praying he could avoid being spotted in the firelight from the burning mill.

The current was frigid, and so fast it was difficult to swim, and by the time Hamilton reached dry ground he felt more like a drowned rodent than a soldier. He was also farther downstream than he'd started—farther from camp—and _now_ he allowed himself the luxury of cursing aloud. Noisily and extensively as he began the slogging trek homeward.

He was somehow not surprised when it began to rain. Or when the rain started falling in torrents, accompanied by painful flashes of lightning and deafening thunder. He continued onward, too stubborn to stop. What shelter could he hope to find in this wilderness anyway? And even if he succeeded, he couldn't afford to tarry. He had duties waiting for him, friends who would worry for him, and his general—

Hamilton did not know what his general would make of his absence. For all the times he'd seen a roiling inferno of temper, he had no notion if Washington held a personal care beyond his vital role as an aide. Perhaps not. _Probably_ not. But Hamilton would be damned before he let Washington down.

The sky was barely graying with dawn by the time he reached the perimeter of the encampment. His legs and feet ached—he had traversed an improbable distance on foot during the course of a single night—and he was sodden through. The rain had stopped some half an hour before, and the heavy layers of Hamilton's uniform clung to him, chilly and dripping wet. The sentries snapped to attention on sight of him, and didn't even demand the password before letting him storm past.

Headquarters should have been dark as a tomb at this hour. Work would not begin until sunup, and Washington's staff should have been long asleep. But light flickered through grimy windows, and Hamilton's brow furrowed as he drew nearer the manor house. He could hear voices as he approached the front door—noisy—revelrous even, and his confusion only mounted. A nod to the startled guard at the front door, and Hamilton mounted the three rickety stairs, stepped across the threshold. His movements were slow; his entire body burned with fatigue.

As he rounded the entry hall and stepped into the workroom, there fell a near-instant silence. All eyes turned to take in his soaked and bedraggled presence.

The entire staff was _drinking_ , he realized. Heavily. There were empty bottles scattered amid foolscap and quills. Flagons and flasks paused midair. The room was a maze of bleary faces and wide eyes, all staring at him.

Any illusion that he'd interrupted a lighthearted revel was immediately undercut by the fact that half the men were crying. John Laurens huddled in a corner on the floor beside Lafayette; his head was buried against the marquis's shoulders, and his skinny frame shook. Lafayette was staring with the rest of the men, expression almost comedic in his shock.

There was no sign of Washington.

"It's a ghost!" Harrison shrieked, only for Tench to drag the flask from his hand and smack him in the back of the head.

"That's no ghost, idiot. You ever seen a ghost look that wet and miserable?"

Lafayette at last roused enough to grin, wide and manic and all teeth. Laurens was already stirring in response to Tench's cry, but Lafayette gave him an extra nudge upright.

Laurens blinked as he sat up. He seemed to come aware of his surroundings only belatedly—Hamilton recognized that his friend was even more drunk than the rest of the staff—and to take in the changed circumstances with eyes that were painfully red.

Those eyes went wide when he took in the open door frame with its sodden occupant.

" _Alexander_ ," he gasped, and shoved himself inelegantly up from the floor. He moved faster than he should have been able to, considering the state of him. It would have been impossible to avoid his approach, but then Hamilton did not want to avoid his friend. He felt guilty enough for alarming his comrades so badly, and he made no effort to dodge the onrush.

John's arms crushed the air right out of Hamilton’s chest, and his voice breathed a disbelieving, "Thank _fuck_ you're alive." He didn't ask how. It seemed he did not care, so long as the proof was here before him.

Hamilton raised his own arms to return the embrace, wordlessly offering what reassurance he could. It was an awkward hug, not helped by the fact that John's intoxication left him clumsy and poorly balanced. When Laurens finally let go, Hamilton had to steady him with both hands to keep him from landing on his ass.

There was no respite, of course. The instant Laurens was standing under his own power, Lafayette closed in on Hamilton. And after Lafayette, Tench Tilghman. It was a tide of laughing, crying, exceptionally drunk soldiers. One after another, all of them more affectionate than they'd ever been toward him before, all seemingly desperate to confirm he was not an intangible apparition.

Hamilton waited patiently for the tide to ebb.

When at last it did, he asked, "Where's the general? I should report in." The sooner he presented himself, the sooner he could get out of these drenched clothes. The sooner he could _sleep_ —an imperative that was already blurring his senses and leaving him uncertain on his feet.

Plus—he could admit in the privacy of his own mind—he was curious to see how Washington had reacted to his supposed death. How he would respond to learning that Hamilton was very much alive, following a perilous but ultimately successful mission.

Laurens stood to his immediate right, and fell suspiciously silent in answer to his question. Hamilton watched, impatient and confused, as Laurens and Lafayette exchanged an indecipherable look.

"General Washington retired to his quarters," Tench interjected before any resolution came of the cryptic exchange of glances.

Hamilton threw his two closest friends a dubious look, before giving Tench a nod of thanks and moving for the hall door.

"Thank you for the kind welcome, gentlemen. May I kindly suggest you all _go the fuck to bed_ , instead of continuing this ridiculous wake?"

Laughter followed his admonition. No one bothered to point out that it was dawn, and theoretically they should all begin their usual work. There wasn't an officer among them in a proper state to deal with military correspondence. Instead, after a moment or two of shuffling, the aides departed headquarters toward their respective beds.

No surprise Laurens and Lafayette were the last to leave—or that they both insisted on embracing him again before vanishing into the graying dawn—but at last Hamilton was alone in the hall. The farmhouse stood eerily silent around him. He circled the workroom, blowing out candles and lanterns. Even with every flame extinguished, the gloom was easing with the gradually brightening sky.

He climbed the stairs slowly, in deference to the wrung-out exhaustion making every step heavy. By the time he reached the second floor, he had nearly convinced himself to turn around. Surely there was nothing urgent in this meeting. Washington would know soon enough that he was alive—the entire staff could tell him as soon as they emerged from their hangovers—and Hamilton's head was swimming with exhaustion, pounding with a headache he had not noticed before he began to climb.

But he’d come this far. And surely—even if Washington was not quite so attached to him as to certain other members of his staff—he would want to know immediately that a member of his military family was all right.

Hamilton reached the door to Washington's quarters and gave a quick rap of his knuckles.

" _Go the fuck away_ ," came a furious shout from the other side of the door. There was unmuted wrath in that tone; Hamilton had _never_ heard his general sound like this. He had never heard his general use such language. It nearly sent him into retreat.

But all his reasoning from before remained true, and he reached for the latch. Breathed a sigh of relief when it gave and the door swung inward. He stepped across the threshold, into a room that would have been pitch dark a short time ago; Washington did not have a single candle lit. With only one small window in the corner farthest from the door—and that covered with a heavy curtain—the shadows made it nearly impossible to see.

The hallway, brighter by far, cast light that perfectly illuminated a narrow patch of floor.

At the end of that patch, with his back pressed against the wall, sat Washington. Knees folded against his chest, head buried in his arms, shoulders tense. His posture stiffened even further at the sound of the door, and without looking up he snarled a fresh rebuke.

"I gave orders that I was _not to be disturbed_." Though quieter, this second volley was almost worse than the first. Fractured. Barely human.

Hamilton's heart twisted painfully at the sight of his general in pain. At the broken sound of his voice. He had seen Washington mourn fallen friends, colleagues, even members of his staff. He had never seen the man _like this_. He couldn't fathom his own death was the cause, but he had no other explanation.

"Sir?" he said, soft and helpless, and took his hand off the door as he stepped farther into the room.

Washington's head snapped up in an instant at the sound of that one word. His face was dry, his eyes impossible to read in the gloom.

"Alexander?" The wounded rage in that voice vanished, replaced with stunned disbelief.

"I'm not dead." Hamilton could barely get his voice above a whisper. He was shaking, and he honestly couldn't tell if it was because of the terrifying strangeness of seeing Washington this way, or his body protesting the fact that he was still upright. His senses were blurring, his vision unsteady in the dimness. His head throbbed harder.

Washington rose in a graceful sweep of motion. Up off the floor so fast that if Hamilton had the capacity to fear his general, he might have fallen back. As it was he stood perfectly still as Washington approached.

"S—?" he began, but did not even manage to finish the brief address before Washington reached him—

Reached him, framed his face with both hands, and took his mouth in a hard and desperate kiss.

It was not a lengthy kiss. Washington drew back almost immediately, yanking his hands away as though scalded. Hamilton gawped. A thousand questions vied for space in his head, but none of them found a voice. He was too shocked, disorientation closing fast around him and making the room spin.

No, he realized an instant too late. It wasn't shock making the room spin. It was the throbbing pain at his temples, the exhaustion dragging at his senses. It was the hours traversing dry countryside on foot, the empty ache in his belly, the scratch of thirst in his throat.

All these things were finally too much, and Hamilton felt his legs give out beneath him an instant before darkness crept across his vision and the physical world faded.

He woke, groggy and slow, in a bed far more comfortable than his own. He didn't feel _good_ , exactly. His head still hurt, his mouth was dry, his throat painfully parched. But he was warm. And safe. And he had an indistinct recollection of reaching headquarters at the end of his desperate journey.

Proper sunlight crept through the open window when he blinked his eyes open.

Washington sat beside the bed—the _general's bed_ —watching him with a relentless focus that made Hamilton's face heat. Washington's posture slouched as though he had been sitting in that chair for a very long time. He was wearing neither coat nor cravat. And his expression held an intensity that, under normal circumstances, would make Hamilton fear someone was about to be reprimanded.

Hamilton did not know what to make of that look in the present context. He wasn't accustomed to waking in his general's bed, or to returning from the dead for that matter.

Abruptly, Washington stirred, straightening in his seat and reaching for the bureau beside the bed.

"Can you sit up?" he asked in a brusque voice.

"I— Yes." Hamilton blinked, and eased himself upright. The movement made his head hurt all the worse, but he remained upright.

"Here." Washington handed him a large tin cup, rough around the edges but full of cool water. "Drink this. _All of it_. You're severely dehydrated. When you're ready, I'll send for food."

Hamilton managed _not_ to retort that he didn't need to be waited on like a child. He very much doubted he could obtain his own breakfast—lunch?—in his present condition. He drank the water slowly, leery of upsetting his already roiling stomach, but he didn't set the cup down until it was empty.

When he looked once more to his general, he found a more considering look on the man's stern face.

"I was given a detailed account of your death." Washington's gaze remained fierce. "I'm relieved to know your men were mistaken. What happened?"

Hamilton licked a stray drop of water from his lip and suddenly—inconveniently—remembered not just returning to headquarters last night, but climbing the stairs. Finding Washington alone and shattered. Hearing his name in a voice too full of feeling.

A kiss.

He swallowed hard and fought not to blush. "We were organizing our retreat when the British scouts arrived. They shot my horse out from under me."

"And no one thought to circle back?"

"They couldn't." Hamilton's soldiers had comported themselves well—had gotten out and not risked unnecessary casualties—he wasn't going to allow Washington to penalize them for following protocols the general himself had devised. "The enemy was already on top of us. If they'd circled back, half of them wouldn't have survived the skirmish."

"And you?"

"I was already in the river. I'm a good swimmer, sir. And it was dark. I managed a clean escape."

A muscle in Washington's jaw clenched. "I believed the report of your death. I should have known better."

There was too much feeling in Washington's voice, though little of it reflected in the careful mask of his face. Hamilton's heart beat faster in his chest, and he averted his eyes. It was only as he let his gaze sweep the rest of the room that he realized the awful state of it. The floor was a disaster of shattered furniture and scattered missives. Even the chair Washington sat on looked to have been smashed against some unyielding surface. The seat did not sit entirely flat, and the wooden dowel between the front two chair legs had been snapped in half.

When his eyes returned to Washington's face, he found a spark of comprehension there. Washington had seen him take in these details. The general did not try to explain the destruction of his quarters; and why should he? The commander in chief of the continental army was not answerable to a lowly lieutenant colonel.

No. That was not entirely true. He did owe Hamilton _one_ answer.

"Why did you kiss me?" The words flew out of his mouth before Hamilton could consider the brazenness of them. He bit his lip but did not try to take them back. Met Washington's unflappable expression with what he hoped was a determined and steady look of his own.

At least his head was no longer throbbing so painfully. His stomach was not lurching quite so hard as when he first woke. He was beginning to feel human again.

Washington regarded him silently for several agonizing seconds before answering, "Because I wanted to, and I wasn't thinking." A pause, a narrowing of dark eyes, and he continued, "Forgive me. It will not happen again."

Hamilton clenched his teeth to hold back the most foolish question he’d ever considered asking. _What if I want it to happen again_?

Ridiculous. Of course he didn't want it to happen again. Of course he did not want his general to touch him. He was certainly not imagining what it might be like, to be fully coherent and feel that demanding press of lips. Or to wake in this bed with the additional warmth of his general's powerful form at his side. Those would be foolish dreams indeed, even if Hamilton were the sort to covet forbidden things.

Which he was not.

"Okay," he said when he trusted his voice not to betray him. "I forgive you."

Another moment, more gauging than hesitant, and Washington said, "Good." Then he rose from his chair and moved to the door. "I'll send for food and a fresh uniform. You are _filthy_ , my boy. When you're well enough to stand you will need to bathe—preferably _not_ in the river."

"Yes, sir," Hamilton mumbled, helpless to do anything but watch as his general disappeared into the hall. He lay back down as heavy footsteps descended the main staircase. Astonishment hummed beneath his skin, alongside a score of unwelcome questions and fancies. He did not know what to do with this new and confusing information.

He didn't know what to do, _period_.

But he wasn’t dead. For the moment he would start there. The rest could be tomorrow's problem.

**Author's Note:**

> Prompts: Apathy, Context, Omission
> 
> I also hang out **[over on Dreamwidth](https://dreamlittleyo.dreamwidth.org/)** , if you'd like to find me there.


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